Bob Dylan sang, “the times they are a-changin’” and sure enough, they have changed for the worse. There’s been a global economic collapse while the U.S. has become one of the worst-diseased populations; folks are not only poor but sick, and many have no alternative for help. President Obama keeps trying to assure us that a health care bill will be passed, but it hasn’t happened yet. The Right (or Wrong) wing of American politics says health care is “Socialism” and so “un-American.”

Of course, these are the same politicians receiving the best free health care this country has to offer. They don’t volunteer to rid themselves of their socialized medicine, funded off our tax dollars. Socialism for members of Congress is OK, but not so for the general population who vote them into office. Ah, America, the beautiful….

In my 45 short years on this planet, I’ve watched friends and loved ones die of cancer, AIDS, hypothermia (because they couldn’t get into a shelter), drug overdoses and alcoholism – Cape Cod rates in the top 5 per capita for those two “habits” – not to mention hepatitis and liver, kidney, and heart disease. However “un-American,” socialism, or socialized medicine, would have saved these lives.

But what’s that got to do with poetry? As we all know, if you want the truth of what any time period was like, don’t read history books – read the poets. And there have been plenty of poets over the centuries in this country who have written about health care and the poetry of hard times.

This issue’s sidebar poem is by James Wright, who died in 1980 and wrote this poem long before our national healthcare issue became big headlines. Everyone has known for a very long time that this issue is a huge one, and it was the poets who brought it to light first. This poem by Wright was published in his Collected Poems in 1971, which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

As is typical with Wright, the character in the poem could be you or me. He paints an apt and accurate description of hard times and the desperation that comes along with that. The poem is of the wandering thoughts and projections of a very desperate man, its aim to tug at your compassion, which I usually see as a typically Left wing thing. You read the poem and decide for yourself.

But James Wright is dead – so what does a living, contemporary US poet have to say? The poem “Disappointment by the acclaimed Tony Hoagland, who will be reading at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth on Oct. 29 at 7 p.m., is a very moving description of the physical, mental and spiritual state of the destitute, who can’t afford anything other than your “scarf of resignation lifting in the wind.” This image of solitude, loneliness, and desperation has only one cure – music. When all else fails, we still have music and our voices to help in the desperate, everyday act of escapism in this moment of ill health and hard times.

These poems, and several other hard-hitting, poignant works on hard times, poverty and ill health, are published in Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor, available on-line at Amazon.com. It’s a must read in American Arts & Letters. Too many fools write off political poetry or poems of social consciousness as “rants,” meaning to disregard the writing by belittling it as something not worth listening to. But as poet Marge Piercy writes on the dedication page of her book of early poems, Early Grrrl, “stay in touch with your anger, so you know where it comes from.” Rant is used like a four-letter word, one of those “bad words” we ought not listen to. This was how the Republican Right wing was so successful for years in ignorance and bliss.

But Garrison Keillor has published a book that is not preachy or didactic in tone. These are poems of witness, poems of America the beautiful, and some of the not-so-beautiful hard times faced by citizen victims of a bastardized Democracy that points at the Devil as the symbol of Socialism. And without Socialism we don’t get national health care or other social programs funded.

So never mind when I die, Mom, I’m already in Hell. Or at least in its waiting room. Once I get in, the demons have got to have better health care and quality of living conditions than we have today in these United States. While I’m waiting to get in, I’ll read Garrison Keillor’s book and a few others. Poetry, it seems, is the best medicine in the meantime.